June 14, 2013 West Point Nebraska Supercell

Mid June and I just now have a storm worth posting an account of. Wow.
Unlike 2012 I can't blame it on the year. Oh well. It's a start but I
have a lot of catching up to do.

I drove to Albion around 1pm. Sat there for a while then Steve showed
up. A while later Tyler showed up as well. The boundary had slid east of
us but wasn't moving very fast or doing anything, so we sat there for a
while. Plus there was a chance something could fire to the northwest.
While sitting there I discover the insides of my back tires are toast.
Should have had an alignment done after we changed the rear shocks
ourselves...evidently. Drives straight but eh something is really wrong.
Tread on outside still fine. Tread on inside you can't even find the
tread bars. Too far gone to even rotate them now. Probably got half the
tire life out of those and will now still have to do the alignment thing
anyway. Didn't save any money skipping that.

Cumulus field to our east gets a bit more agitated, to the north east
of the hot high based storms that had formed southwest of Columbus. We
move rapidly north and then east on highway 32. Well we moved north to 32
then saw the agitation getting going so flew east. We reach highway 81 at
Madison and begin to think the cu field up there might remain capped.
Thought was to then get to storms moving into Columbus and hope they do
better entering the better air. I'm heading southeast towards Columbus
and see a close tower just northeast of town and the back of something
else further up there. Soon one blip was on radar but seemed it had to be
past the first tower I could see. This blip was right on the nw-se warm
front boundary that was clearly showing up on radar. It was a super easy
decision to me then to get to that storm. Crappy part was this was
happening as I was entering Columbus, sigh. I had planned to drop south
of town for the other storms but now wished I was back up on highway 91!
So I drive through town and get east to Schuyler, then race north from
there to highway 91 then east.

There were two returns, one better one to the northeast of the other
but both at that boundary. Figured something nice would form on the
boundary and turn right. I thought maybe even turn southeast on it.
Anyway the storm was still pretty lame as I was getting closer to it and
just south of it. As I drove east and got southeast of it, it looked
mildly better. I turned north on some gravel road north of 91.

Jumping east on a gravel road north of 91 southwest of West Point.
About now I thought, hey this is a start. I figured really this was all
the better it would get. Really not good enough. It was pretty humorous
about now realizing I've driven 240 miles to get 45 miles from home lol.

As I drove north in front of it, it got a bit better. Now I thought,
hey now we are talking. Somewhere in here I see Brett and talk to him for
about 10 seconds. Just north of him was a big ol church. Had to shoot it.
Wish I had just stayed there and shot it with the storm more.

You don't come across this op every chase day. The inflow winds were
raging pretty good now, out of the east.

I got the impression while there that it was still progressing east
and closing in. I still wanted to get more north. So I leave here pretty
fast. Might have been there just a minute. The storm has pretty much
stopped though. Timelapse from here would have been pretty darn good.

I drive north some more. The radar deal showed a whole lot of chasers
in the area now. I saw very few and I knew most of the ones I saw. So
glad most muck up the highways and loiter there...cept when I'm using
them of course.

Wrapped up.

All these were shot with either the Samyang 14 or Zeiss 21 on a 6D.
The wider ones like this obviously the 14.

The best looking storm I know of from that area of NE in a long long
long time. I live close to here and I have nothing from northeast NE east
of Ewing and south of where the highway 12 storm was shot("Katrina") west
of Sioux City in 2004. I consider the area a blackhole and always hope to
be chasing west of there, closer to O'Neill, as just that change in
distance is the polar opposite for me and what I've caught. I've caught
the most worthy stuff from Valentine to Ewing area. While biggest void
even closer to home between Blair and Ewing.

It's just too bad it was going to get overtaken from the stuff to the
southwest so soon. Might have had close to 1 hour of being cool though.
Took forever to get a tornado warning out of it, which seemed surprising
watching it at the time. And once there was a tornado warning the storm
wasn't even worth the digital space on the card. I was right there in the
area on highway 32 then and it was just a blob. It had a ton of rain in
front of it then too, right up to it. I actually drove up into the core
to sample the hail but it was lame. It always is when I willing decide to
sacrifice all the glass in the car.

Raced a line home. It looked mean on radar and I just barely beat it
to town. Actually tied it. It was amazingly weak though. Then met Randy
and Bob to shoot some lightning from the barn. There were some pretty
good crawlers. I wanted tv tower bolts so I shot those over and over.
Nothing ever hit the towers, let alone rose up off the towers. That
amazed me as much anvil activity as there was above them. I wish I had
switched to telephoto sooner. I could have plastered this frame with
bolts from stacking. This is 400mm. I was at 50mm hoping for crazy upward
bolts. Finally after about 50 CGs down there I put the telephoto on, only
to kill them about 5 CGs later.